Hatch Door SAT
Saturday, September 2nd, 2023 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Slept in until 1:10PM today. Both cats were upstairs when I got up, which is exceedingly rare. Yvette and I went into the back yard, and I gave Natalie a 20 minute bubbling. Snoop & Prowly both came out to join us eventually.
Now it's past 2PM and I'm still drinking my coffee. I have to make a beer run before anything else.
It's 85F out there, and that appears to be all the hotter it will get today.
Sunset's not until 7:30, and dusk doesn't end until 8PM.
So... even though I'm getting a late start, maybe I can get enough done today to make the hatch door swap-out tomorrow be a quick affair.
Okay, ran down to Randall Liquors for smokes & beer, then stopped at Fiesta Food Mart to get $60.00 out of the ATM.
But Adrian's Auto is closed. :(
No doubt they'll be closed tomorrow and Monday as well.
So that spare tire's gonna have to stay on my car for another week.
Okay... now I'm gonna cool off and regroup here, and then get outside to start on the hatch door.
Won't have to leave the house again until tomorrow night, quickly, for smokes.
Wow! This is what happens when you don't knock wood!
I just got back from Ace Hardware!
So, I went out there, detatched the old cable, and removed the rubber flashing covering the hinges against the house.
I went inside to gather up all my unistrut hardware into a bucket... some new stuff from on the porch, and some old stuff from down in the basement.
I brought the new PVC fittings and the big channel locks down into the basement too... and decided to open up the old counterweight... which opened without much trouble.
But then checking the fittings I bought, I realized that the cap I'd gotten was not correct! It wouldn't fit over a 4" pipe without a coupler!
Also, my PVC glue went bad!
So I had to make a run out to Ace hardware, at 4PM, in heavy traffic, with the sun in my face, praying they didn't close early for the holiday.
But luckily they were open, and had exactly ONE coupler in the size I needed. They also had the glue and the primer.
So I bought that stuff, rushed back home... and now I'm in the back room again.
Because whenever I leave in the car and then come back, Yvette thinks that means it's time for a walk. But I don't have time to waste on a walk in the blazing heat and the afternoon sun!
So I'm just sitting back here to do an update while she settles back down.
87F out there.
I was doing okay out in the heat... just attaching the new cable hardware to the unistrut.
Got all the eye bolts in place, and then found my little connecting clamps for the fixed points on the cables.
But those clamps use little nuts, and I dediced to run in and find the nut driver that fits those nuts... And oh my god!.. I had to run all over the house, upstairs and down, to find that goddam nut driver.
And THAT'S what made me break a sweat and get all grouchy. So now I'm cooling down back here again.
Well, I finally got the show on the road and got some shit done out there.
And then I came to a stopping point at 7PM and it was time for Yvette and I to go for a walk, on which we were joined by Prowly, who shadowed us around to the opposite side of the block... where we turned around and came back.
First thing I did was fasten my two cables to the central fixed points on the unistrut... which went quickly, thanks to having the nut driver on hand.
Here's the eye bolts and pulleys on the left side.
Eye bolts and pulleys in the middle.
And there's the same configuration on the right side.
And you can see here that the rubber flashing is gone, exposing the hinge mounts on the house.
Now that I'm done standing on the door to do all the unistrut stuff, I can remove the hinges.
I marked the holes of the central hinge, so that I can attach the new central hinge to the exact same spot.
After that I removed the whole door... and removed the hardware. then I cut up the old door with my circular saw.
That piece, upper right, was still good, so I put it down in the shop.
The hunks with the handles I took to the porch, to remove the handles later.
The rest of the door got thrown away in the garbage bin.
The underside handle turns out to have been a much bigger problem than I realized.
The rust on these washers that were on the underside attest to the fact that rainwater was getting through the door at the points where this handle was screwed up top.
And indeed I took note that much of the wood rot began just downstream of the lower screw for this handle.
So the lifting eye bolt on HD1.0 wasn't the only source of rot... it was also coming from this handle.
Water would get inside the wood up here... soak down... join up with the area being soaked by the eye bolt... and that whole lower portion of the door just rotted away.
Catastrophic failure due to my not properly waterproofing those penetrations.
But up where the hinges were, there was no rot at all... because the heads of the screws, over the bodies of the hinges was enough to divert all the rainwater further down.
Therefore, I will not be reattaching that underside handle until I can find some machine bolts with proper heads on them that will divert water, instead of allowing it down inside.
But that's okay, because the underside handle isn't critital to the door.
It's just nice to have, to close the door from the inside.
With that... it's 8:30PM and very soon there will be another conference call with Colleen, Sheila, and Tim.
I may get a little more done out on the porch as I talk with them.
But then again I may not.
The first day of this operation required too much running around to get everything together... and to get beer and soforth.
So hopefully I'll make more progress tomorrow, as I won't have to leave home for anything [knocks wood] and there won't be a sibling conference call at 9PM either.
°¦}
